Toasting the Glee Stage Show at Radio City Music Hall

The four martinis my friend J. and I consumed prior to the Glee Live show on Saturday night were essential for a variety of reasons. First, because they were tippled at the bar atop the Peninsula Hotel, which is both one of the tacklassiest open-air rooms in New York—patronized almost solely by the International Fellowship of Brand Sluts—and in exquisite proximity to our venue, Radio City Music Hall. Second, the $22 charge for each of these liquor buckets included a perfect, buffet-style, spa-dinner—a small dish of sesame snax, smoked almonds, and wasabi peas—that supplemented our liquid carbs with sustaining protein. And finally, the leisurely consumption of these forty-four ounces of cheer landed us in the lobby of R.C.M.H. 45 minutes after the printed start time, allowing us to miss what the ticket-taker referred to as “a bunch of break-dancing and etcetera” and giving us just enough time to order a fresh pair of doubles before the lights went down, the shrieking roared up, and the a-cappella bom-bom-bom opening of “Don’t Stop Believing” caused follicles to rise on the napes of even the most hairless necks.

Steve Perry refuses to sing with Journey anymore, leaving the job to a Filipino impressionist whom the remaining band members discovered after days of trolling through YouTube videos of tribute groups. But this elastic entanglement with authenticity is still two scoops shy of the pasticcio triple-dip my friend and I were served from the stage of Rockefeller’s Folly. I can now say with confidence that I’ve not only had the privilege of consuming (culturally and aurally speaking) the digestive output of a snake eating its tail, but that I have stood, intentionally, in throbbing orifice from which said excreta emanates. And that I enjoyed it. So much so, in fact, that the celebratory shrieks I released in response caused the six year-old girl in the seat in front of me to literally shudder and bury her face in her mother’s chest.

It was a strange concert, in that it was almost entirely without surprises. The audience consisted exactly, almost humiliatingly, of precisely who you would expect to see there: young kids animatedly singing along with their parents; teens dressed in their best Sexworkers and The City finery; swarms of haggy fruit flies in tented tops; and of course, Gays. The set list consisted of a carefully curated suite of songs that criss-crossed over these crossover demographics—show tunes, recent hits, 80s hits, 90s hits—and included every Number One download from the show’s astonishingly fecund well. The energy was predictably, unerringly, upbeat, like a youth group performance in a Kansas mega-church on the annual Conversion Lock-In Weekend. Even the seemingly spontaneous moments, such as when certain cast members suddenly appeared in the aisles, failed to shock, as literally everyone in attendance (myself included) had read online reviews from the previous night’s show alerting them to the exact timing of these forced intimacies.

This is not to say it wasn’t a spectacular night. It was, in the most literal sense of the word. The twelve young stars gave like Jews on Yom Kippur. They danced and twirled tirelessly, and in near-unison, as if each of them were struggling to catch sight of a tiny, and very revealing, post-it note someone had pasted just below their topmost thoracic vertebra. They donned expressions and gestures grand enough to be interpreted readily by even the most emotionally neglected Romanian orphan. And they all sang forcefully, until at least ninety-percent of their body’s blood was concentrated above their necklines. This was all just what I expected, as well. But that’s okay. While some would claim that the joy embedded in many pleasurable experiences—riding a roller coaster, having an orgasm, killing a deer—is predicated on an element of surprise, I would counter that this kind of stupefaction is not only cheap—as easily slaked by a shout or a slap in the face—but one of the more overrated levels in the taxonomy of satisfactions. Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe my pleasure receptors have become dulled by too many years of alternating currents, but I find that maintaining general enjoyment for eighty glorious minutes is much more valuable to me than one, or even a series, of dragon-chasingly irreplicable gotchas.

Like many of the other concertgoers, at the show’s end, my sidekick and I spilled onto 6th Avenue chanting Queen’s “Somebody to Love,” and though it was only 10:00—meaning we had a minimum of four more hours of drinking ahead of us before we could competently call it a night—and we were already hopelessly inebriated, stank sweaty, and surrounded by show trash, our spirits remained almost divinely elevated as we made our way to the bar. And they stayed so for the duration of our adventures (or at least until J. passed out.) If that’s not Glee, I don’t know what is.